PowerPoint was
developed in 1984 by Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin of the Silicon Valley
software company Forethought. They created a PowerPoint precursor called
Presenter, which soon was renamed PowerPoint. Forethought along with
Presenter were acquired in 1987 by Microsoft, and a Macintosh version of
PowerPoint went on sale that year, four years later, a Windows version was
released.

PowerPoint is way beyond branding. It left branding in the dust long ago.
With more than 300 million users worldwide, according to a Microsoft
spokesperson, with a share of the presentation software market that is said
to top 95 percent and with an increasing number of grade school students
indoctrinated every day into the PowerPoint way - chopping up complex ideas
and information into bite-sized nuggets of a few words, and then further
pureeing those nuggets into bullet items of even fewer words - PowerPoint
seems poised for world domination.

Presentation
Graphics has been a phenomenon among many users world-wide because of its
1,2,3 step process when it comes to creating and presenting ideas to a large
audience. Microsoft PowerPoint compromises of hundreds of tools for adding
dazzling effects and animation to your presentation.

Version 12 of
PowerPoint could be best described as Graphics at its finest. Microsoft is
looking at reengineering how the product handles graphics; one of the best
examples of this strategy is the IGX graphics tools that are a prominent
part of this release. Although it is available in most Office 12
applications it is really the feature that makes PowerPoint 12 a worthy
upgrade already. Regardless presentations may seem redundant to many folks,
the main point of it is to draw the user’s attention to the important points
of any type information being delivered.

Located under the
Insert Tab, the IGX graphics presents a gallery with stunning diagrams that
are of superb quality. Diagrams ranging from Processes, Hierarchy, Cycle and
Relationship, each offering a tremendous amount of options for making your
point’s standout. After selecting IGX Graphics, something happened, I
experienced, “the ribbon”. It’s hard to describe it, I would say, it’s an
action sensitive tool that presents its self according to the action taken.
Providing groups of tools within one toolbar the ribbon is also an
additional layer of options for further improving a presentation.

In the entire core
Office 12 Applications using the new user interface I have noticed a general
trend, each has a key Tab. PowerPoint’s power can be found under the Design
Tab. The Design Tab consists of four galleries that focus on making your
presentation have a stunning visual impact on your audience. These include
Page Setup, Themes, Custom Background and Arrange.

Page Setup Gallery
is pretty much obvious, it sets the default orientation for your slides
which is most of the time in landscape. Unless you are handing print outs,
you are likely to use portrait. I consider its location a cause for
convenience and that’s an important part of the Office 12 user experience.

Themes is also all
about convenience, a gallery of all the canned themes that were once
available in TaskPane in Office XP and through the main dialogue when you
first launched PowerPoint 2000 or 97 is now integrated in the Toolbar. What
really makes it interesting and gets you giddy is the real time preview of
what a Theme looks like before you actually apply it to the slide. Now
that’s what I call cool stuff. I have to give kudos to the PowerPoint Team
for that. There are other options available for changing Colours, Fonts and
applying various effects. Creating annual presentation reports should be a
whole lot of fun when PowerPoint 12 is released.

Custom Background
gives you options to choose from a set of colours for PowerPoint. I don’t
see the relevance of having this under a separate gallery since it is
basically like applying a Theme. It’s really a replacement for the default
white slides you see the first time you launch PowerPoint.

The Animation Tab
is a transitioned (no pun intended) aspect of the PowerPoint 12 user
interface, that integrates pretty much all of the same tools that were once
located under drop down menus or the Task Pane into Chunks. Animations have
four tabs, Preview, Animation Schemes, Transition to This Slide and
Transition To Next To Next Side.

Preview has two
buttons that allows you to Preview the slide within the presentation or
traditional slide Show. The Animations are all there and provides all the
familiar tools for adding custom animations with different schemes.
“Transition To This Slide” provides various effects that appear during
slides in a presentation, this chunk also has various tools for adding sound
and tweaking the speed and specifying appropriate slides. The Transition To
Next Slide continues on the same formatting tools, I don’t see the relevance
since On Mouse Click and Automatically After tools are similar to applying
effects.

PowerPoint 12 has
lot of features to offer users when it comes to ease of use and productivity
tools for creating presentations. The interface is simpler to navigate
compared to prior versions, a lot of features which were mostly all over the
place are now centralized in the Toolbar for quicker and easier access. The
IGX graphics will be a hit with users who create technical presentations and
want sophisticated graphics in their presentation that are more attractive,
informative and grabs the audience eye. As a core Office application it
continues on the path of user interface consistency along with its other
siblings, once you learn one of the core Office 12 applications such as Word
12 or Excel 12, you should feel right at home using PowerPoint 12.